DrumView for BeOS

Drum View for BeOS is a visualisation program that shows you MIDI drum events as they are transmitted.

You may find it useful to see how professionally sequenced drums within whole music files or "MIDI clipart" from companies like Twiddly Bits are actually played.

As a given drum is played, a red square is drawn over the drum. Each Note On event is followed closely by another with velocity 0. These two events draw and remove the red square. The size of the square is proportional to the first Note On velocity.

The drum kit is limited to a core set of drums. Unhandled drums display a square in the top left corner. Supported General MIDI drums are:

  • 33 - Bass Drum L
  • 35 - Bass Drum M
  • 36 - Bass Drum H
  • 38 - Snare Drum M
  • 40 - Snare Drum H
  • 41 - Floor Tom L
  • 42 - Hi-Hat Closed
  • 43 - Floor Tom H
  • 44 - Hi-Hat Pedal
  • 45 - Low Tom
  • 46 - Hi-Hat Open
  • 47 - Mid Tom L
  • 48 - Mid Tom H
  • 49 - Crash Cymbal
  • 50 - High Tom
  • 51 - Ride Cymbal 1
  • 52 - Chinese Cymbal
  • 53 - Ride Cymbal Cup
  • 55 - Splash Cymbal
  • 57 - Crash Cymbal 2
  • 59 - Ride Cymbal 2
The drum kit design is based on kits used by Neil Peart (Rush) and Mike Portnoy (Dream Theater). A Pearl drumkit brochure also provided details of stands and colours. Attention has also be placed on the stereo pan settings defined by the Yamaha MU90R synthesiser to place the drums.

Currently, there are editions for BeOS R5 and 32bit Windows (Windows 95, 98, Millennium and Windows 2000). Future versions will also target the Microsoft .NET framework.

No special setup is required. Copy the program to an appropriate folder and create a link to it if desired.

EMail: mark.hirst@tesco.net
Web: homepages.tesco.net/~mark.hirst

Mark Hirst, 14 February 2001

Connecting a MIDI source to Drum View

Under the Be operating system, connecting MIDI applications together is a breeze.

Typically, the MIDI source will be a drum machine, keyboard or a sequencer.

On the right, you can see the PatchBay applet supplied as source code with BeOS. You will need to compile this project before use.

Down the left you can see icons representing the MIDI inputs on the system. Across the top you can see the MIDI outputs. The number of ports will vary according to the configuration of your computer.

In this configuration, the fifth row represents the MIDI port of a Yamaha WaveForce 192XG soundcard. You can identify an input or output port by moving the mouse over the icon. A tooltip window will display.
When DrumView loads, it registers a MIDI Consumer with the operating system. Since it does not supply a custom icon (at this time), Drum View is represented by a question mark icon (?). Setting the check box at the intersection of the soundcard row and the application column connects them together.

If you are in doubt about which icon is Drum View, use the tooltips feature. Drum View identifies itself in the tooltip.

Drum Machines or Keyboards

If you have connected a keyboard or drum module, you may start its playback function at this point. Ensure that the device is configured to transmit the data. On a keyboard, this may require that "accompaniment out" is switched on.

On a keyboard, you will probably want to select a drum kit from the voice list. This will give you a direct correspondance between sound and visualisation.

In the event of nothing happening, check your MIDI output settings on the device and of course cabling. PatchBay displays a helpful colour bar as it detects events on the input port. If you see no colour bar, PatchBay is not getting your data.

Sequencers

The use of PatchBay assumes that your BeOS sequencer recognises MIDI consumers as potential outputs. Sequiter (shown on the right) is one such sequencer.

DrumView for BeOS and DrumView for Windows currently do not filter MIDI events by channel.

Generally, drum events are output on channel 10 (although this is not mandatory). Under 32bit Windows operating systems, drivers such as MIDI Yoke enable sequencers to output particular tracks to virtual ports. Drum View is then connected to one of these ports.
Since a track is slaved to one particular port, there is an implicit filtering of events.

Please feedback on whether the lack of channel filtering is a problem on BeOS.

Note also that Drum View does not pass on MIDI events. This limitation also exists on the Windows version. To hear drums at the same time, you may need to duplicate the drum track so that one feeds Drum View, the other your synthesiser(s).

Setting Note Lengths

You may notice that the red squares appear and disappear so rapidly that they are difficult to see. Unlike normal MIDI Note On events, Drum events are triggers (that is, their length is irrelevant, they simply trigger the drum sound).

As a consequence of this, professionally sequenced files can have short note lengths. To improve visibility, you might want to run a macro against the drum track to set all note lengths to a larger value (say 30 ticks).

Feedback

This release for BeOS offers broadly the same functionality as the Windows version.

The drum kit is incomplete and there are quite a few more pieces to be added. Fortunately, the Windows and BeOS versions share the same bitmap and positional code base. This means that both will keep in step with developments in the model.

Please let me know about what you think about this program.